Thread by @jsjoeio

🤖 Monthly Venmo Script

I wrote a script to send automatic recurring payment requests on Venmo using Python, @telegram and @github Actions 🚀

github.com/jsjoeio/monthl…

👇 How it works + the backstory

How it works:
- Python script which sends Venmo request to 3 people
- Telegram bot sends me a message after each request is sent
- Uses GitHub Actions + scheduled workflows to run automatically
- Other script runs once a week to make sure everything is working

Backstory

I've had this idea for a while. For the past 2-3 years, every month I send the same Venmo requests to the same 3 family members. I thought to myself, "Is there a way I can make these automatic?"

And, I didn't have a good system. I would send the request if I remembered or if I happened to see the receipt in my email.

I remember looking for a solution back then, but didn't find anything.

Recently, I've been spending a lot of time writing scripts to automate things. I remembered my idea and thought, "Maybe today you can do it."

Low and behold, you can!

@mohad3s wrote a wrapper for the Venmo API in Python which makes requesting money as easy as calling a function.

github.com/mmohades/Venmo

Since GitHub Actions gives you 2,000 minutes per month + they can run on a schedule (aka cron), meaning you can run this for free!

The icing on the cake was adding notifier by @liiight which lets you easily send notifications via various providers (in my case, Telegram).

This meant I could run the script and send notifications using a Telegram bot letting me know things succeeded.

github.com/liiight/notifi…

Here's a ~2min video of me talking a bit about it and waking through some of the code:

It was a fun project to build! I open sourced it as well. You can check it out here 🌟

github.com/jsjoeio/monthl…